Mets' RA Dickey looking for 20th win today

NEW YORK — The questions have all come for R.A. Dickey surrounding the individual accomplishments he has achieved, and how they could grow in the coming days. He takes the mound this afternoon (1 p.m., SNY) seeking his 20th win, a number that could push his chances forward for a Cy Young Award.

But he points to a box in the locker adjacent to his, and what it contains might mean as much to him as any of those accomplishments.

The box is filled — and it’s not a small box — with letters. Almost all of them are reactions to his book, “Wherever I Wind Up,’’ and many of them are about his revelation that he was sexually abused as a child by a baby sitter.

“I read every one of them,” Dickey said. “I can’t answer each one of them personally. There are just so many. But that means so much if the book helped someone. You never know how a book will do, but if it sold one copy and it helped one person, that’s amazing. Crazy to think the knuckleball brought that.”

The knuckleball has weaved an erratic path for Dickey to this day. While he has been celebrated in publishing (a three-book deal to write children’s stories) and movies, and he has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, his 2012 season might be as unlikely as anything he has done.

His career was sidetracked before he even signed his first contract. The Texas Rangers pulled back their $810,000 signing bonus and offered up a $75,000 courtesy deal after finding out he had no ulnar collateral ligament. He floundered through the minors and fringes of the majors for 12 years before surfacing with the Mets in 2008 as a non-roster invitee. With the knuckleball finally a reliable ally, he has become the most consistent starter on the team.

And now, just over a month away from his 38th birthday, he is a front-runner for the Cy Young Award and pitching with a chance to win his 20th game before fans who have cheered him through all of the team’s troubles for the last three years.

“I really hope for that,” he said of the chance to win it at home. “That’s one of the reasons I moved my start in the first place; was to try to share a milestone such as that with the fans here. So it would mean quite something. It may mean the most of things for me in this moment.

“Obviously, there’s something that looks pretty about that number. I’m not going to pretend that it’s not nice. It’s just again, my whole mentality is geared around how can I be consistent? So I’m going to go out there and try to put up a quality start, just like I always do, and hopefully it’ll equal a win.”

Dickey never had won more than 11 games before this year and that number — achieved in his first year in New York — was the only time he reached double figures before this year. But he enters this start leading the National League in ERA, complete games, shutouts, and is two strikeouts and one victory off those league leads.

Still, the numbers don’t mean as much as what he has seen his celebrity do for him, and more to the point, for others. For Dickey, the accomplishments are tempered, just as David Wright’s march to the franchise hit record was, by the struggles of the Mets.

“It is similar,” Dickey said. “Regardless of how well it finishes for me personally, it will be somewhat bittersweet in the sense that we didn’t do, as a team, what we set out to do. Of course, you have to try to hold on to the positives when you can. I’m so happy for David and for any player in here that hits a milestone or a goal that he set for himself. So there’s that, too. You’ve got to hold them both. It would be much sweeter, though; I would trade it for a playoff.”Email: popper@northjersey.com